Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP), this paper assesses the relationship between life satisfaction and religious practice. The main new result here is longitudinal. It is shown that individuals who become more religious over time record long term gains in life...

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

We investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic decreased the willingness to pay for urban amenities such as restaurants, cinemas and theaters. We do this by using a hedonic pricing model in combination with a time-gradient difference-in-difference approach. We use a data set that contains...

We study the role of education during the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy. We compare the trends of mortality rates between municipalities with different shares of educated residents between 2012 and 2020, by means of a continuous event study model and controlling for many confounders. We find that...

We document externalities of the civic unrest experienced in Ferguson, MO following the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. Difference-in-differences and synthetic control method estimates compare Ferguson-area schools to neighboring schools in the greater St. Louis area and find that...

This paper examines the effects of county-level urbanization and natural amenities on subjective well-being (SWB) in the U.S. SWB is measured using individual-level data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) which asks respondents to rate their overall life satisfaction....

Positive and negative feelings were central to the development of economics, especially in utility theory in classical economics. While neoclassical utility theory ignored feelings, behavioral economics more recently reintroduced feelings in utility theory. Beyond feelings, economic theorists...

We provide a tractable model of motivational goal bracketing by a present-biased individual, extending previous work to show that the main insights from models with rational goals carry over to a setting with non-rational goals. Goals motivate because they serve as reference points that make...